imagine, for a moment, you float in the Void. maybe on wings, or in a ship. you can see around you the planets, the dust, the rocks, the star you orbit. think about the way your body tells you you’re still- in the absence of a force pulling you one way or another off your path, your gut drops. free fall is taking the path through the void that requires the least effort, after all.
minds and souls orbit ideas, just as they orbit stars. consider your velocity to be the speed of your progression through logical time. of course, that only makes sense within a certain frame of reference. drop your horizon length down to the scale of a human life, and those same ideas orbit you instead. it all depends on where you rest your fixed point.
space is unhelpful in this sense, just as Truth is unhelpful in some respects. how do you look at your actual trajectory in the void when a fixed point is in some sense a meaningless concept? there’s nowhere to anchor your vision. okay, then- pick the closest sufficiently-massive idea and center the universe there. for you that’s going to be Consensus.
the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. the tides come and go. plants grow. people enter and leave your life. there’s food at the grocery store. your job sucks. death and taxes and the imperial dream. you know the story. you know how it ends, too. you can make basic calculations. hurrah.
but you know something else affects things, too. an unknowable force making a fly-by reduces your life to ashes. maybe you’re fired, maybe there’s a crash, maybe you encounter someone who doesn’t seem to obey the laws of physics as you understand them. prediction error means course correction, but you’ve spent an entire life with your feet on the ground. you might not even feel it.
of course, there’s always the possibility that you do. or maybe you picked somewhere else to center your calculations? there’s always the option of centering the unsea on yourself. maybe you want to learn to fly. this is the exact inverse of finding a fixed point- and hey, if you build your halo well enough you might even be able to hack together some artificial gravity. you can go anywhere you like. your free will lets you orbit anything you want, with the right thrusts.
this is a fantastic way to fling yourself off into the abyss with no hope of return, at least within your lifetime.
and neither does it represent the Truth. ideas do not orbit you, nor are they fixed ground for you to stand on. even the most massive ideas in the system do not remain static.
all someone needs to do to throw off your calculations and send you reeling is conceal any information- that a massive idea exists somewhere, that the sun is not where your maps tell you it is. trivial. you’re a trickable agent, and your map of reality forms young. most travelers of the void do not learn cartography when they have better things to do.
pick any idea to be your final frame of reference and watch it exbibit undefined behavior where your map skews from reality.
try this, instead: find the center of ideogravity for the universe. pick this as your fixed point and use it to find exoplanets. use it to do the impossible. no matter how eccentric you make your orbit, this can bring you back. become a comet, a shooting star.